The Year of Living Helplessly

The viral imagery from January 6 reveals the deepest 2020 feeling we tried to deny

Eve Fairbanks
GEN
Published in
7 min readJan 15, 2021

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Screenshot via @NRKveronica/Twitter

So much video poured out of the Capitol last Wednesday, but I couldn’t stop watching two: the shaky film of a lone police officer running up the stairs ahead of pro-Trump rioters and the clip, also shot on a cellphone camera, of a man alone on his D.C. porch raging into the…

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Eve Fairbanks
GEN
Writer for

Eve Fairbanks’s essays appear in The Guardian Long Reads, The Washington Post, and other outlets. She is at work on a book about South Africa.